You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
How the Studio Museum in Harlem Reshaped the Art World. (Harper’s Bazaar)
Anahid Nersessian on Marisa Meltzer’s “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (NewYorker)
[Charlotte] Gainsbourg shoots her mother as if she were a medieval sculpture of a sad but radiant saint whom the passage of time only ennobles.
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ECHO DELAY REVERB. Art américain et pensées francophones, Naomi Beckwith et Elvan Zabunyan (dir.), coéd. Palais de Tokyo (17 octobre 2025) Editions B42.
[Arundhati Roy] writes … on a paper napkin for her friend to hold on to, formulating with that rare and exultant combination of passion and rigor what success really means:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
via The Marginalian
Also. It was a sudden revelation (Woolf)
and for some
certain only of the syllables
it is the element they
search their lives for
Lucille Clifton, “the garden of delight”
Whatever I care for, someone else loves it
more, deserves it more: the doe with her
whole mouth crushing the phlox or the seer
who adores my future, whereas I could
take it or leave it. I know I’ll disappear.
It won’t be glamorous. It won’t be like when
the Mona Lisa was stolen and the tourists all
lined up to pay their respects at the empty
spot on the wall of the Louvre.
I’ve never actually even seen the sky.
I’ve only ever seen effluents, seen wattage.
The only night I remember is the dinner
of neighbors at which a man I never
had met before said I don’t fear dying—
look at the past, people have been dying forever, and—
then he stopped and shook his head—
I drank too much. I was almost saying
that people have died forever and all
of them survived, but of course—he made
a hard laugh—God, of course they didn’t survive.
The Sky, Natalie Shapero
Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall
attitude of entitlement toward
the body of his wife. Some people
say the devil won’t need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing
comes after this life. Some people say
that in spite of the devil’s public,
long-standing, and meticulously
logged disdain for the health
and wholeness of his wife, the devil
spends all day, every day, insisting
grandly and gleefully on his general
pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly
considers himself to be an unswayed
crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of
the devil’s several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.
Sunshower, Natalie Shapero
I am ashamed to keep thinking of death
as a chute that connects to the garbage. I know
I should picture it more like the pneumatic tubes
at banks of the past: you put in your name
and your paper and up you go. I know a bank
should be the operative metaphor
for every facet of existence, every time. I’m sorry
I haven’t more regularly made reference
to a bank. When I fail to liken something to a bank,
that’s how I can tell I’m tired. That’s not me,
I assure everybody. That’s the long week talking. Time
for bed. Time for the window, the hectoring sky,
the streetlight bright as the bright saved people
see before they die, but I don’t die.
Long Week Talking, Natalie Shapero
The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram, Andrea Fraser. e-flux Notes, October 17, 2024.
The exponential growth of the art world since the mid-1990s is often framed as a process of geographical expansion and integration driven by neoliberal globalization and wealth concentration. However, this expansion was enabled, more broadly, by the power of contemporary art to capture an extraordinary range of investments: not only financial investments from private, public, and nonprofit sectors, but also the aspirations and energy of growing numbers of people drawn to the field and the possibilities it promises. And this expansion was also enabled, ironically or not, by radical avant-garde and political negations of aesthetic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries, which created the conditions for art’s extraordinary expansive capacity and incorporative power.
[…]
Today, the consolidation of art’s subfields has produced distinct arenas of discourse and practice and has defined distinct stakes within their specific material and symbolic economies. Competition over the distribution of these stakes seems to have overtaken any significant contestation of their definition. What once might have been relations of struggle between these subfields, or over the values that define them, now appear to be relations of mutual dependency, if not parasitism. It is the mutual dependency of art’s subfields, above all, that holds the field of contemporary art together and each of its subfields within it.
[…]
Many artists work at the intersections of different subfields, creating art that reflects multiple criteria and even attempting to produce value, experience, knowledge, community, and social change all at once. From some perspectives, working across criteria may represent resistance to capitulation to any one subfield. Or it may represent the ambition to engage with more than one, for greater success or simply survival. Or it may reflect the condition of being ambivalently split between different criteria and values and social spaces. Or it may simply reflect the confusion produced by fields that tend to obscure their basic conditions in order to protect their interdependency. In any case, the circular logic of this analysis implies that the most successful or impactful practices in each subfield are those that fulfill its specific criteria most fully. At the same time, every subfield remains the site of struggle over the criteria that define success within it. In this regard, the most ambitious and influential practices may be those that succeed in redefining the criteria of their subfield, or of the art field as a whole.
[…]
If politics are struggles over the definition and distribution of the values and forms of power that structure social space, Bourdieu’s model offers a way to understand the complexity of the different forms of power at work in the art field and of the relationships among them.
One implication of Bourdieu’s analysis of the location of cultural fields within the field of power is that most struggles within cultural fields, as well as struggles waged from cultural fields within the field of power, carry a structural ambiguity, if not duplicity. They are, for the most part, not liberatory struggles against power but competitive struggles among the empowered over the nature of power and its distribution; they are not struggles between classes but struggles between what Bourdieu calls “dominant class fractions,” which serve to reproduce the “division of the labor domination” (cultural and economic, symbolic and material) more than to transform it. At the same time, it is in the dominated position of cultural fields within the field of power that Bourdieu finds the conditions for the historical tendency of cultural producers to feel and potentially act in “solidarity with the occupants of the culturally and economically dominated positions” outside of the field of power, “to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize … dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power.” However, even with this structural basis, such solidarity, “based on homologies of position combined with profound differences of condition,” may produce little more than self-mystification among cultural producers while serving as grist for the mill of cultural production and for the reproduction of the art field itself.
[…]
Recognizing that the art field, and subfields within it, are structured according to multiple and competing forms of power, and identifying those forms of power and their dynamics, is the only meaningful way to consider their politics. So, the first question to ask of any field is: What are the criteria revealed by the practices that are supported and succeed within it? What are the values that underlie those criteria, and thus structure hierarchies of position within the field? What forms of capital, or power, do those values represent and in what social spaces and groups are they concentrated? What forms of domination do their concentration represent? Which of those values and hierarchies are at stake in struggles within the field? Are those struggles competitive struggles to gain power and position within those hierarchies, or transformative struggles to change them? What forms of power are employed in these struggles themselves and what hierarchies and forms of domination do they produce or reproduce? What new forms of social organization or principles of hierarchization, if any, are emerging in their place?
Untitled (Purple and Brass Apparition), 2018.
Archival pigment print. 9 ? x 14 inches.
Monuments, [c]o-organized and co-presented by MOCA and The Brick, MONUMENTS marks the recent wave of monument removals as a historic
moment. The exhibition reflects on the histories and legacies of
post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today, bringing
together a selection of decommissioned monuments, many of which are
Confederate, with contemporary artworks borrowed and newly created for
the occasion. Removed from their original outdoor public context, the
monuments in the exhibition will be shown in their varying states of
transformation, from unmarred to heavily vandalized.Co-curated by Hamza Walker, Director of The Brick; Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator at MOCA; and Kara Walker, artist; with Hannah
Burstein, Curatorial Associate at The Brick; and Paula Kroll, Curatorial
Assistant at MOCA, MONUMENTS considers the ways public monuments have
shaped national identity, historical memory, and current events. Following the racially motivated mass shooting at Mother
Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC (2015) and the deadly ‘Unite the
Right’ rally organized by white nationalists in Charlottesville, VA
(2017), alongside Bree Newsome’s powerful removal of the Confederate
flag at the South Carolina Statehouse (2015), the United States
witnessed the decommissioning of nearly 200 monuments. These removals
prompted a national debate that remains ongoing. MONUMENTS aims to
historicize these discussions in our current moment and provide a space
for crucial discourse and active engagements about challenging topics. MONUMENTS features newly commissioned artworks by
contemporary artists Bethany Collins, Abigail DeVille, Karon Davis, Stan
Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, Cauleen Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson,
Walter Price, Monument Lab, Davóne Tines and Julie Dash, and Kara
Walker. Additional artworks by Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Nona
Faustine, Jon Henry, Hugh Mangum, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, and
Hank Willis Thomas, are borrowed from private collectors and
institutions. The exhibition presents decommissioned monuments borrowed
from the City of Baltimore, Maryland; the City of Montgomery, Alabama;
The Jefferson School for African American Heritage, Charlottesville,
Virginia; the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia,
Richmond; the Valentine, Richmond, Virginia; and The Daniels Family
Charitable Foundation, Raleigh, North Carolina. By juxtaposing these
objects with contemporary works, the exhibition expands the context in
which they are understood and highlights the gaps and omissions in
popular narratives of American history. MONUMENTS will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and a robust slate of public and educational programming.